1.
Christ is
risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia! Today
the living Lord Jesus Christ comes and rips away the blanket of death which
once enshrouded this sinful world. To all who doubt; to those who deny; to
those whose hearts are ruled by cynicism, their minds by skepticism, the Holy
Spirit speaks and says, "...in fact,
Christ has been raised from the dead. Follow Him, believe and be saved."
Amen.
2.
The chief priests confront us
with the one teaching that truly defines a Christian: What do you believe about
the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ? What one believes about the events of
the first Easter is the test of faith. Paul
seems to sum it all up in 1 Cor. 15: “If Christ
has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. . . . And
if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your
sins” (1 Cor 15:14, 17). The message
is taken from Matthew 28:11-15, which says, “11While
they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the
chief priests all that had taken place. 12And
when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a
sufficient sum of money to the soldiers 13and said, “Tell people, ‘His
disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14And
if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of
trouble.” 15So they took the money and did as they were directed.
And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.” The message is entitled, “The Chief Priests--A Lie Spread, the Truth Victorious.” Let he who has ears to hear, let him
hear.
3. Good Friday alone doesn’t save. The
debt for sin was paid, but there was no victory. Jesus’ lifeless dead body was taken down from
the cross and placed in an empty tomb.
So what does the resurrection show? It shows that God the Father
accepted the life of Jesus for our sins. Without the resurrection, this Jesus
was swallowed up by death, just like all the rest of humanity from the
beginning of time. Without the resurrection, believers who have already died
have perished, and so will we. Without the resurrection, this world and
our Christian life are without meaning. Once you snip off eternity, what point
is there to this world at all? What difference does it make whether you’re a
saint or just plain evil, if there’s no moral reckoning beyond this life? If
this world is all there is, then we’d better say what the other children of
this world say: “Eat, drink, and be
merry, for tomorrow we die.” Right? The resurrection is what gives all of
life its meaning. Without it, life is empty, hopeless, and pointless.
4. You can’t have it both ways:
either Jesus rose from the dead, or he didn’t. The various attempts to ride the
fence—Jesus rose in spirit
rather than body, and the variations on that theme—are quite stupid and extremely unacceptable.
5.
Nothing
in this world’s past or present is of more importance, interest, or controversy
than our Lord Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Critics of Christianity have
repeatedly attempted to discredit the resurrection. They’ve done so to protect
their position, to deal with their fear of God, and to undermine the confidence
of believers.
6. The
lie of the chief priests in our text, which they told to protect their
position, is only the first of many to cast doubt on the resurrection at the
first Easter. It’s called the “stolen-body”
theory: the disciples removed Jesus’ body so that they could produce the myth
of a risen Christ.
7. Other
theories range from the crude to the elaborate. They include theories about an angry
gardener who wanted to keep people out of the garden and moved the body to an
unmarked grave, the wrong tomb, or the idea that Jesus didn’t really die on the
cross, and that the whole thing was a hallucination. Probably my favorite is
that Jesus had a twin brother who remained in seclusion until Jesus’ death on
the cross. Then he emerged, giving the impression of resurrection.
8.
The
danger of a lie isn’t that it will destroy the truth, but that the lie makes us
uncertain and undermines our belief in the truth. A lie told a million times
will be believed as if it were the truth.
9.
The
various lies about the resurrection have one important point in common: they
all set down as fact that the tomb was empty! Strange! Wouldn’t it have been a
much more effective attack against Christianity to prove that Jesus’ body was
never missing, but that it lay in Joseph’s tomb all the while? Amazingly, this
argument hasn’t been used, and for good reason: there’s compelling evidence,
outside the Gospel accounts, that Jesus’ tomb was truly empty on Easter
morning.
10.
Let’s
grant the argument of his enemies. If Christ didn’t rise, suppose the disciples
stole the body: where is he buried? And you have another problem when you deny
the resurrection. Remember what the disciples did on Good Friday? They were
very courageous, right? They were more like grade A cowards. They ran! They hid!
If Christ didn’t rise, and the disciples all got together and decided to lie
about it, can you tell me what changed those 11 men into courageous witnesses
of the resurrected Christ? Would you be willing to die for a lie? Because
history suggests that all the disciples except one were martyred. Do you follow
me? Something changed those people. We know, of course, that the resurrection
is the truth, but it would’ve been an awfully obvious lie. If Jesus didn’t
rise, and the disciples stole his body and hid it someplace, then they had an
awful lot of nerve to die for a lie that size. Instead, Scripture says, “Take God’s Word for it,” and the reality
is so obvious. It transformed the lives of those men completely. The reality of
the resurrection and the pouring out of the Spirit has the power to transform
us too.
11.
The
circumstantial evidence for the empty tomb is overpowering. It deals with the
question “Where did Christianity first
begin?” To this, the answer must be “Only
one spot on earth: the city of Jerusalem.” But this is the very last
place it could’ve started if Jesus’ tomb had remained occupied, since anyone
producing his body would’ve snuffed out the flame of an infant Christianity
preaching his resurrection. What happened in Jerusalem 7 weeks after the first
Easter could’ve taken place only if Jesus’ body were somehow missing from
Joseph’s tomb. For otherwise, the temple establishment, in its confrontation
with the apostles, would simply have ended the movement by making a brief trip
over to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and unveiling exhibit A. They didn’t do
this, because they knew the tomb was empty. Their official explanation for
it—that the disciples had stolen the body—wasn’t just a lie, but also an
admission that the tomb was vacant and empty.
12.
The
chief priests spread a lie, but the truth is victorious! Jesus Christ is alive! Alleuia! We have a living Lord. And because
Christ lives, there is a tomorrow for you, me and all who have faith in Jesus
as our Lord and Savior. Because Jesus lives, we have a future and a hope. Not
only that, there’s meaning to all our days. We can face each day with the
reality that we’re not alone. All our days are changed. All our feelings rest
on the foundation of joy in the forgiveness of our sins that Jesus won for us
through His death on the cross and His glorious resurrection from the dead. All
our behavior is motivated because he “was
raised to life for our justification” (Rom 4:25). Therefore, We Live in the Reality of Easter as God’s
People.
13.
We
worship him. We’re not afraid to say that we believe in the living Lord. “[We believe in] the resurrection of the
body, and the life everlasting” (Apostles’ Creed, Third Article). We stand
on the faith given to us, by which we’re saved. Christ is risen! He is risen,
indeed! Alleluia! Amen.
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